Task Force Takes Aim At Faculty Teaching

Teaching may take a leading role in determining faculty hiring, promotions, and raises after a new task force on teaching and career development presents its recommendations to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences this spring.

The nine senior faculty members on the Task Force on Teaching and Career Development met for the first time last Monday to discuss ways to improve teaching at a university notorious for ignoring classroom performance when measuring faculty excellence.

The faculty culture can be changed to emphasize teaching by linking compensation to success in the classroom, said Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Theda Skocpol, who is chairing the group.

The membership of the new task force and its tight deadlines are signs that the committee’s efforts will result in action, not just discussion, Skocpol said.

“These issues have to be discussed seriously by senior faculty or you can’t expect real change,” she said.

The task force will release a preliminary report for faculty discussion on Feb. 1, and a report with final recommendations on April 1.

“I don’t think it’s going to be radical, but it’s going to be substantive,” Skocpol said.

Interim President Derek C. Bok wrote in an e-mail that he is confident that the task force will engage with the wider faculty community to produce proposals which a majority of professors will support.

Plans for the task force began this June as a result of conversations between Skocpol, Bok, and Interim Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Jeremy R. Knowles.

The Faculty needs to approach teaching with the same rigor that it approaches research, Knowles wrote in an e-mail.

“In our scholarly work, we give our colleagues chapters of our books to read, we solicit their help with research problems we have, and we continually strive to improve the quality of our work,” Knowles wrote. “Why should we not act analogously, in our teaching?”

Skocpol said that the interim leadership of Bok, an expert on higher-ed reform and the author of “Our Underachieving Colleges,” has created momentum for teaching reform.

“We need to get the report out there while Derek Bok is president,” she said.

No students or administrators are part of the task force in order to allow professors to talk frankly about issues of faculty tenure and salary, Skocpol said.

Besides Skocpol, the members of the committee include 300th Anniversary University Professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, who is also chair of FAS’s Committee on Pedagogy; Andrew A. Biewener, chair of the department of organismic and evolutionary biology; Benjamin M. Friedman, professor of political economy; Mary Malcolm Gaylord, professor of Romance languages and literatures; Eric Mazur, professor of physics; Xiao-Li Meng, chair of the department of statistics; Michael J. Puett, chair of the department of East Asian languages and civilizations, and Kay Kaufman Shelemay, professor of music and African and African-American studies.

—Staff writer Lois E. Beckett can be reached at lbeckett@fas.harvard.edu.